As in a saintly vision, Donato Dalrymple appeared, as he seems to whenever television cameras are gathered together. The odd thing was that even many hardcore correspondents failed to recognise him at first. He looked familiar, but then the place was crawling with familiar looking people, so Dalrymple looked as though he almost fitted in.

Then the penny dropped. This was the fabled fisherman who had rescued Elian Gonzalez from the ocean and spent the next six months burnishing the legend. In fact, Dalrymple was a house cleaner being taken on one of his first fishing trips, and he stayed on the boat while his cousin plunged into the water to lift the traumatised Cuban five-year-old from the car inner tube he had been clinging to. But those details were subsumed in the born again Dalrymple's over-arching faith in Elian the Redeemer, which finally reached its zenith in that final traumatic photograph of Elian being taken from Dalrymple's arms by heavily armed police.

Now, five months later and just before Dalrymple had been forgotten entirely, he was back poking his head in front of the cameras outside West Palm Beach's Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), an anti-hurricane bunker where some of Florida's awkward ballots were being counted. It was as if the star of one discontinued Florida soap opera had stumbled onto the set of another.

Describing himself as "a victim of the administration", Dalrymple said he had come to check on reports of skullduggery by Gorites inside the EOC.

Rumours had been spreading of lost chad, the tiny fragments of cardboard on which we now discover US democracy stands or falls. As the cynical are now fond of repeating: Chad happens. It happens in particular when voters punch holes in their punch-card ballots but fail to dislodge entirely the little rectangular perforated plug they were supposed to punch out. It clings on and causes problems in the machines.

When it came to the manual recount in West Palm Beach and Broward counties, Republican observers were finding little bits of chad on the floor after recounting sessions. This, they claimed, was clear evidence of ballot tampering, or at least, mishandling. The Democrats countered that the chad was destined to fall off. It proved that it had only been hanging on by one or two corners, so by dropping away it was simply revealing voter preference.

This difference of opinion caused several minor scuffles in the rush to get to a piece of chad first, and one accusation by a Republican observer that a piece of chad had been eaten by his Democratic counterpart.

From the point of view of a reporter, chad is fairly amusing at first, and there has been much guffawing at "pregnant chad", which describes the condition of a punch-card which has been punched but not penetrated, so that the chad protrudes but holds on with all four corners. It is cumbersome to describe.

But think of the foreign press and what linguistic gymnastics they have to go through . The Germans have come up with "Shwangeres Konfetti mit Ausbeulung" - pregnant confetti with a cavity. In Cantonese, it is, phonetically, "dye toad see", which roughly translates back as big stomach paper. For the Italians it is "scheda elettorale malperforata", badly perforated ballots.

In any language it is a perfect story, mixing high politics and low farce, low-tech voting in a hi-tech economy. It is ridiculous enough to silence the usual American boasts about the "greatest democracy on earth", but the mess has been displayed so openly and with such transparency as to give pause to even the most hardened cynic.